Towards Smart TV

Leuven.
If this is Thursday, I must be in Belgium... I've made the (surprisingly lengthy) trip from Hamburg to Leuven near Brussels for the EuroITV (as in, interactive television) conference. On the face of it, this may seem only peripherally connected to my own research interests, but in my paper I'll be continuing to explore the theme of user-led disruptions to the conventional television model which I addressed in my MIA article and the presentation at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress last year.

We start with a keynote by Rich Ezekiel, Director of Yahoo! Connected TV. He begins by outlining Yahoo!'s successful experiments with TV widgets. This responds to changed user expectations for television, which are driven not least also by phenomena such as increasingly powerful DVRs, video on demand, growing Internet connectivity in TVs, a proliferation of TV channels (whose content is no longer identified through electronic programme guides, but through a search logic), and substantial changes to the economics of content.

Ultimately, this means that the new TV economy will look a lot more like the Web - content will be delivered over IP networks, not through broadcasting; applications will become central, and search will play a key role in fixing the broken TV advertising marketplace. There are a number of sometimes conflicting interests and stakeholders in the TV ecosystem, in other words, and these players are not at this point cooperating effectively, but are each engaged in inventing and reinventing their version of the wheel.

What dimensions are most important for innovation in this space, then? Users are expecting more; device developers are looking for innovation; publishers want to explore new channels; and advertisers seek better connections. In order to realise such ambitions, we need to work towards 'smart TV', Rich suggests. Yahoo!'s TV widgets (small portable applications which are able to run on the new-model televisions of many brands - built on the Konfabulator widget engine which is also available for desktops) are a step in this direction.

The idea here is to enrich the TV experience by adding Internet values - but at the same time, the existing values (ease of use, reliability, high fidelity, and entertainment) which have made television successful also need to be retained. Internet values to be targetted here include personalisation, community, relevance, and openness. Openness, for example, has been proven to foster growth and innovation; it enables a variety of developers to reach users, and thereby also creates greater user choice. Additionally, user interface and user experience need to be considered, and user choices, widget performance, aesthetics, and upgradeability must be ensured.

Such widgets enable TV users to engage in info-snacking (accessing news, tracking eBay auctions, following the stock market, tracking RSS feeds, checking the weather forecast, following and posting to Twitter or Facebook, etc.). Widgets are accessed from the TV through an online gallery and added by the user to their widget dock (again, similar to desktop widgets). Widgets could also enhance the viewing experience by providing more background information to current programmes (not unlike teletext, but drawing on the wealth of information available online rather than on the information available from a handful of content providers only). This enables socialisation, and makes TV technology better suited to - two-way - communication.

This is also likely to require further technology changes, though - ideally, the inclusion of slide-out QWERTY keyboards in TV remotes, Rich suggests, but in the first place also on-screen keyboards, predictive text input, and other tools. Similarly, in the bezel (the frame) of TVs, Webcams should be inserted, in order to enable Skype and similar two-way communication systems (after all, the same manufacturers already include such cameras in the frames of their virtually identical flat screen monitors...).

Overall, though, it is crucial to keep in mind and maintain established TV values as well as integrate the new Internet values in the developments towards smart television. Researchers and developers in this field must act as the voice of the consumer in this context, Rich says.

Technorati : EuroITV 2009, Yahoo!, euroitv09, innovation, smart TV, television, widgets
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